After 21 years, the Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF) “Flickers” had its first unpleasant encounter with the new political climate: Director Kaveh Mazaheri of the 20-minute short Retouch and its filmmaking team are unable to come to screenings in the United States due to visa restrictions against people from Iran. It isn’t a political […]
Perhaps the most serious madcap farce ever written, playwright Dario Fo made continuing revisions to his 1970 Accidental Death of an Anarchist to keep up with current events in the real case that inspired it. Italy from the late 1960s to the early 1980s was approaching internal civil war with both the far-right and the […]
Nostalgically showcasing the worst excesses of organized crime when Mafia Don Raymond L.S. Patriarca controlled New England, Last Good Heist rehashes the bad old days of mobbed-up PVD, lately frequent fodder for true crime. The 1975 Bonded Vault Heist, the subject of this book, has the entirety of Episode 4 of the podcast “Crimetown” devoted […]
From the moment evil Knight Commander Fernán Gómez (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) appears on stage eager to grab the women of the town by the pussy, there is no mistaking the contemporary relevance of this play by Spanish Renaissance master Lope de Vega. Grounded in a real historical incident that took place in 1476, Commander Gómez […]
[See Tammy Laforest as our pin-up: https://motifri.com/pin-up-tammy-laforest-mx-bisexual-2017/] “It’s a gender-neutral word: it could mean genderless, it could mean girl, it could mean boy,” explains Tammy Laforest who in April was awarded the title “Mx. Bisexual Rhode Island 2017” by RI Pride‘s increasingly misnamed “Triple Crown” pageant (because it now awards more than three). Laforest pronounces […]
After a number of years as part of the August Foo Fest, the Rhode Island Mini-Maker Faire (MMF) is moving to the June PVD Fest, still in close collaboration with local arts collective AS220. Among other changes, the move allows MMF to expand its hours; the event now runs from 1 – 8pm on Saturday, June […]
Ron Long as a 19 year old in 1982 came up with the idea for a customer-friendly car repair garage that would make available professional-grade tools, lifts and state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment to do-it-yourself mechanics, but it wasn’t until 2015 that he and his wife Cheryl opened Gearhead Systems International in Warwick. “I was in the […]
The real Wilhelm Furtwängler was a polarizing and divisive figure in 20th Century music. Universally acclaimed as one of the greatest orchestra conductors of all time, he chose to remain in Germany during its Nazi years between Adolf Hitler coming to power in 1933 and the end of World War II in 1945. Furtwängler made […]
Simply reading the 77-page decision by the Rhode Island Supreme Court provides a thorough and authoritative tutorial to the exercise in backroom politics that lies behind the approval of the Deepwater Wind “demonstration project” off Block Island. It’s all there: how the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) initially found that the agreement to sell wind power […]
Rhode Island is unusual among the states for a tax policy that treats rolling papers as equivalent to cigarettes, such that a package of 20 sheets of rolling paper is taxed as if it was a pack of 20 ready-made cigarettes, the current excise tax for which is $3.75. Sales tax of 7% is then […]